While Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has built his campaign around relentless attacks on President Trump, law enforcement, and others, Michigan is seeing tangible progress from Trump Administration policies on auto deregulation, targeted tariffs, and crime reduction. These moves have reversed years of costly Democratic mandates and begun bringing manufacturing jobs home, offering a sharp contrast to El-Sayed’s lack of a practical plan for the state’s core auto business and broader economy.
The rollback of Biden-era electric vehicle mandates has halted massive financial losses that hit $52 billion last year for Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis combined. By ending the forced push toward EVs that customers largely rejected, the Trump Administration freed automakers to reinvest in the internal-combustion engines that actually sell. Former Detroit Three autoworker and Autoworkers for Trump founder Brian Pannebecker has praised the approach, noting that eliminating the EV mandate was workers’ top priority and that “never has someone in the Oval Office fought for us and understood our situation as well as President Trump.” During a historic summer visit to GM’s Proving Grounds in Milford—the first by a U.S. president to the facility—Trump highlighted the termination of Biden’s CAFE fuel standards, which he called a path to bankruptcy for every car company, and the elimination of California’s longstanding exemption to set its own emissions rules. That exemption would have forced 35 percent EV sales by 2026 or $20,000 penalties per noncompliant vehicle, threatening billions in fines.
Tariffs aimed at reshoring production from China, Mexico, and Canada have produced concrete announcements of plant expansions and returns totaling thousands of jobs. Truck and SUV lines are coming back to places including Kansas City, Illinois, and Metro Detroit’s Lake Orion GM plant. Toyota and Lincoln models are shifting from Mexico and China, while Stellantis—previously hammered by EPA fines for V-8 engines under Biden—has seen profits surge. Pannebecker has pointed to potential full shifts returning to the Warren truck plant for heavy-duty production previously moved to Mexico, and Jeep products heading back to Belvedere, Illinois, from Canada. These gains have even drawn bipartisan acknowledgment, and they continue with further investments such as Audi’s recent $4 billion SUV plant announcement elsewhere in the U.S. Critics claiming tariffs merely drain automaker funds overlook the offsetting billions in reduced regulatory costs from ending the mandates.
On crime, Detroit has seen violent crime fall 9 percent and homicides drop 25 percent this summer compared with a year earlier, part of a broader decline after the post-2020 spike linked to “defund the police” rhetoric that El-Sayed once endorsed. Local stepped-up policing has been paired with a 43 percent rise in ICE arrests of illegal aliens, many with criminal records. National violent crime rates (excluding simple assault) fell 25 percent from 2024 to 2025. El-Sayed’s campaign, by contrast, has offered little in the way of detailed, results-oriented strategies for sustaining auto manufacturing or supporting other Michigan businesses—favoring instead progressive priorities and attacks over the deregulation and reshoring already producing jobs and stability. Michigan still faces energy-price and business challenges from years of Democratic state leadership, but the federal policy shift of the past two years has delivered measurable relief where it matters most.
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